Micah Sloat visits Katie while she stays with the Reys. Left home alone with Hunter, Kristi hears noises upstairs. While investigating, a mobile over the baby’s crib moves on its own.

Night #3: August 9th, 2006 – Hunter appears to respond to a presence in his room. The next day, Kristi, Ali, and Martine comes across the photo of Katie as a child that is later found burned in Katie’s attic.

Night #4: August 10th, 2006 – Noises are heard on camera, although no one is woken. Abby spends the next morning barking and pawing at a door leading to the basement.

Night #5: August 11th, 2006 – Martine stays with the baby while the rest of the family is out for the evening. Martine is drawn to a loud noise upstairs that wakes Hunter and prompts Abby to bark repeatedly. Daniel and Kristi return home and find Martine burning sage throughout the house. Daniel fires her.

Night #8: August 14th, 2006 – Kristi comforts a crying Hunter and hears strange noises. His bedroom door swings further open without being touched. In the morning, Daniel cleans up a dead bird outside that flew against Hunter’s nursery window.

Night #10: August 16th, 2006 – Kristi is spooked by a pan that falls repeatedly in the kitchen.

During a backyard pool party, Micah becomes fascinated with the handheld video camera. Daniel tells Micah that Kristi believes their house has a ghost. The conversation causes Katie to mention the experiences that she and her sister had as children.

Night #11: August 17th, 2006 – A fire starts spontaneously on the stove. Daniel believes his daughter is responsible since she is outside in the hot tub with Brad.

Kristi asks her husband how the pool cleaner ends up out of the pool every morning. They review the video and watch the cleaner creep out of the pool on its own.

Night #12: August 18th, 2006 – Abby growls at the nursery window.

Kristi believes her husband is not taking her seriously after he pulls a prank with the pool cleaner. To apologize, Daniel offers to take Kristi away for the weekend. Before leaving, Daniel jumps into the hot tub and the water scalds him. Brad comes over while Ali babysits her brother and they use a Ouija board. They ask the spirit what it wants. The pointer starts to spell “Hunter,” but the teens stop paying attention.

Night #13: August 19th, 2006 – A shadow creeps towards Ali and wakes her as she sleeps on the couch. Ali checks on a noise outside. The front door shuts suddenly and locks her out. Footsteps are heard ascending the staircase. An invisible force pulls Hunter out of his crib. Hunter makes it downstairs and opens the basement door before crawling back upstairs. Daniel and Kristi return home and find Ali missing. Ali comes back and tells her parents what happened. Kristi believes her, but Daniel tells her to stop inferring that their house is haunted.

Ali records a video diary where she mentions persistent nightmares, including one about a man appearing at the foot of her bed. She starts researching on the Internet and concludes that the presence in the house is a demon and not a ghost. She finds a passage about a demon taking the first-born son of someone who makes a pact for wealth or power. Ali shows her father the footage of her being locked out of the house, but he passes it off as the wind.

Ali talks to her mother about the strange occurrences in the house. Kristi tells Katie that she thinks what is happening might be related to the experiences from their youth. Katie tells her sister to drop the subject. While Kristi is home alone, all of the cabinet doors in the kitchen fly open simultaneously. Ali asks her mom about what happened. Kristi insists that everything is fine and tells Ali that Katie told her not to talk about it or things would get worse. Ali wonders if Kristi’s great-grandmother made a deal with a demon, as Hunter is the first born male on Kristi’s side of the family since the 1930’s.

Night #19: August 25th, 2006 – The basement door opens. Abby struggles with something off camera before being pulled away. Daniel finds the dog collapsed from a seizure and rushes her to the veterinarian. In Hunter’s bedroom, Kristi is attacked and pulled downstairs into the basement by the invisible presence. She later emerges in a trance and goes back upstairs.

Ali finds blood and scratches on the inside of the basement door. Kristi has a scar in the shape of a bite wound on her leg. Ali notices that her mother is behaving oddly. Ali shows her father the surveillance video of Kristi being pulled into the basement. Daniel calls Martine to cleanse the house. She advises him on how to exorcise Kristi. Kristi attacks Daniel when he approaches her with a crucifix. The lights go out and Kristi disappears as the house erupts in commotion. Kristi and Daniel struggle over Hunter in basement. Once his wife is finally subdued, Daniel burns the photo of Katie as a child.

Three Weeks Later – Kristi tells her sister that the strange events stopped plaguing her house. Katie confides that there are now odd occurrences in the San Diego home she shares with Micah. Micah was subsequently killed on October 8th, 2006.

October 9th, 2006 – A bloodied Katie appears inside the Rey house. She snaps Daniel’s neck as he watches television on the couch. Katie then enters the nursery and throws her sister into the camera before leaving with Hunter.

Epilogue text reveals that Ali returned from a school trip and found her parents’ bodies on October 12th. Katie and Hunter both remain missing.

Review:

Even though its timeline begins before the events of the first movie, “Paranormal Activity 2” is not entirely a prequel. It would be more accurate to christen it as a “paralleloquel” since it bookends the original and has a final act operating in tandem with its predecessor’s conclusion.

Familiarity with PA1 is not a requirement to be affected by PA2’s method of delivering chills, although it will add context to the relationships and help to make sense of the ending. As a “found footage” horror movie, “Paranormal Activity” has enough of its own going on to be taken as a standalone experience.

Before the family demon can begin haunting Micah and Katie over in San Diego, it whets its appetite by first taking on Katie’s younger sister Kristi Rey in nearby Carlsbad. Kristi welcomes newborn son Hunter to the home she shares with husband Daniel and daughter Ali, but celebrating the new addition to the household is forced into a temporary hold.

Roughly two months before Micah and Katie would deal with their own invisible intruder, the Rey family comes home one afternoon to find their house ransacked. Daniel takes the opportunity to outfit the home with a half dozen surveillance cameras and the family is now primed to capture any unexpected activity that may occur 24/7. As the series title indicates, the activity recorded ends up being of the paranormal variety.

The usual “found footage” formula, the bulk of which can be credited to or blamed on the first “Paranormal Activity” for cementing in stone, is in full swing. Casual cast introductions meant to establish sympathy/empathy lead into a hill and valley tempo of gradually escalating tension before breaking into a full sprint for the finale.

The Rey family is relatable enough as the centerpiece. Actress Sprague Grayden physically resembles what a Katie Featherston sister probably looks like and comes with a similar “girl next door” charm. Daughter Ali has a playful relationship with Spanish-speaking nanny Martine and only enough teenage huff and puff to keep her in the realm of extremely personable. Even the way they handle the initial break-in with disappointment that melts into upbeat humor, rather than hotheaded anger and woe-is-us attitudes, casts everyone in a positive light.

Taking the reins from Micah as the resident scoffing skeptic is Kristi’s husband Daniel. Daniel is nowhere near as irksome as Micah, but like his brother-in-law, he has a thankless role. As the person shutting everyone up about ghosts and haunted houses, the audience cannot help but view him as hopeless, since no one would be watching the movie if he was not dead wrong.

The timeline is not the only thing paralleling the first movie. The structure does, too. The first offscreen scream that made the camera come running in PA1 was Katie reacting to a harmless spider. PA2 tries the same trick, except this time the fuss is over an odorous surprise someone left in the toilet. PA2 retreads so much of the same ground as the first one, including Ouija boards, Internet demonology research, mysterious trances and bite marks, etc., that the play-it-safe approach gives off the scent of having little new material to offer.

To give the film a longer leash with creative options, PA2 ups the ante in the number of available cameras. The jump from PA1’s single camera to PA2’s seven (six surveillance feeds and one handheld) turns out to not be an improvement.

Every time a “Night #XX” placard comes onscreen, the cameras cycle through the same pattern of six security feeds, whether anything is happening in them or not. Front door – Pool – Kitchen – Living Room – Staircase – Nursery. By the time the film makes it to “Night #19,” the rotation becomes so redundant that it inspires audible sighs stemming from the knowledge that several shots of nothingness are about to eat up the runtime.

The repeated sequence would make sense if the six cameras were on a timed rotation, but that is not the case. This is footage recovered after “actual” events, after all. And the security system records all of the camera views simultaneously. In the movie’s fiction, this means that whoever assembled these clips could have easily trimmed all those useless shots of the pool cleaner floating in the water.

Worse than including filler footage is that the film cheats when action finally does take place. In one scene, the evil presence pulls the baby from his crib and guides him to the basement. How the little one made it out of the crib and down the stairs remains a complete mystery however, because the movie nonsensically cuts to an empty kitchen instead of showing the event. The goal of baffling the audience in such an instant is partially understandable, but it undercuts any semblance of authenticity regarding the idea of recovered videotape.

The benefit of PA1 having only one camera is that it confined the activity on a smaller scale and provided a claustrophobic feel. Seemingly innocuous things like moving doors and footprints in talcum powder took on sinister tones because they occurred in the same space where Micah and Katie were sleeping unaware. When a pot falls in the kitchen or the cleaner jumps from the pool in PA2, the scare factor is absent since no one is nearby when it happens. PA2 misses out on creating the same sense of danger as the first movie.

Audiences really responded to the creaking doors and slow build anticipation that “Paranormal Activity” delivered. “Paranormal Activity 2” aims more towards loud bangs and alarming thuds to make the audience jump. But without the creeping dread, they end up being empty frights.

This key difference in how the two movies go about their scares is why many who enjoyed the first did not respond to the second, and vice versa. PA1 worked on the mind in a way that PA2 does not. Remove PA2 from its connection to the “Paranormal Activity” mythology and consider it as simply another “found footage” horror movie. Aside from its franchise association, there is nothing in “Paranormal Activity 2” that is not readily available in dozens of similar, and better, entries in the same sub-genre.